Peace Page 27

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She went back to the beginning. She’d been a lecturer at the teachers’ college, and some of her old fluency and authority returned as she told her story. In her fifth year of lecturing, aged twenty-eight, she’d met Martin. She didn’t use his name, talking to Hirsch: ‘That little man,’ she said.

  The first years of marriage were okay. She worked, the little man worked, they made a home together. They had a daughter, and Joyce enjoyed staying home to raise her. But when she felt ready to go back to work, the little man thought it unwise. Her duty was to look after the home they’d made together. ‘I was a cliché,’ she said.

  Depression crept up on her over the long years, chronic and incapacitating. She felt useless. Her friends drifted away, and Martin seemed to have none of his own.

  ‘That little man and his disappointments,’ she said. The missed opportunities he suffered, the forces that acted against him—anything from losing a job promotion to losing a parking spot. It was never just bad luck, and never involved a deficiency on his part.

  Hirsch eyed the Myer shopping bag. Stuffed with something soft. Running-away clothes? She was holding on to it for dear life, anyway.

  ‘And he’d hit you sometimes?’

  ‘Not at first. Not for years. But recently, yes. You know what decided me? Or what decided me on top of everything else? When he hit poor Brenda. The exact same look on his face, the hatred.’

  Coming to be near their daughter and her family in Tiverton had not been the cure for their miserable life. Annette had moved back to the city to get away from Martin and his obsessions. ‘So he immersed himself in this godforsaken place,’ Joyce said. ‘No offence.’

  ‘None taken. I was sent here. It’s growing on me, but I take your point.’

  ‘And when I say immersed, I mean he was into everything.’

  ‘I’ve worked out some of it,’ Hirsch said. ‘The Pandowie Downs apostrophe. Kip winning a dog prize he thought should have gone to your daughter’s dog.’

  ‘Kip was just the better dog,’ Joyce said. She shook her head as if you wouldn’t credit what made her husband tick. ‘Poor thing. We had him shut in the laundry for a week. I let him out one day when the little man was at the tennis club. I told him Kip shot out between my legs when I opened the door to feed him. I got a fist in the stomach for that little bit of defiance.’

  ‘He reported me to police headquarters in the city, you know. I had to go down and get hauled over the coals.’

  Joyce closed her eyes briefly as if distressed on his behalf. ‘He was furious with you because you kept fobbing him off with the dinner invitations.’ She gave Hirsch a crooked grin. ‘Those evenings you did come must have been fun.’

  Hirsch shrugged and smiled. ‘Good tucker, though.’

  She nodded, as if appreciating his kindness. ‘He was hoping to be Santa again, even though it meant he couldn’t enter the Best Christmas Lights competition. Then the council chose you to be Santa, so he went all-out with the Christmas lights. Expected to win, of course.’

  ‘A compensatory thank-you from the town?’

  ‘Very good. You’re getting the hang of how he thinks.’

  ‘His light display was pretty good. Nan’s was better.’

  ‘Much better. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the room: she won when she shouldn’t have.’ She paused. ‘He hit me just now.’

  ‘That’s what brought you here?’

  ‘You have to understand. My mind…for years it was a tiny, inward-looking thing,’ Joyce said. ‘I could only see what was right in front of me: was the mantelpiece dusty? Had I set the table properly? Had I ironed his handkerchiefs perfectly? I couldn’t see the world, Paul. I couldn’t see the ripple effects of everything he did and said and thought.’ She cocked her head. ‘Like that film he put on the internet. He was having a go at you, he wanted to hurt you—and look what happened. It brought bad people here, evil people.’

  Hirsch was uneasy now. He kept his voice mild, unhurried: ‘Where is Martin, Joyce?’

  He eyed her clothing, her arms and her hands. She was as neat as a pin. If she’d stabbed or clubbed the little man, there was no evidence of it.

  ‘Oh, he’s messing about on his iPad. There’s always some chat room where he can post a message, always some site that will feed his misery and resentment.’

  ‘You didn’t have to explain where you were going?’

  ‘I told him I was taking some old dresses to the charity bin outside the church.’

  She placed the Myer bag on the desk. She nudged it. Nudged it again with more confidence, as if taking the biggest of all her big steps. ‘I expect,’ she said, ‘they can test for equine DNA?’ Another nudge. ‘With any luck, where he’s going someone else will do his laundry for him.’

  Hirsch pulled the bag closer. He plucked at the opening, revealing a neatly folded pair of overalls, neck uppermost, M. Gwynne on the nametag sewn inside the collar. Slowly he slid the stiff fabric into view, and saw where jets and smears of blood two weeks old had darkened the folds, and even though he’d long figured it out, he still felt the need to brush his palms against his chest, and he jerked back as something dank and rotten drifted past his nose and spread, and settled—and then Joyce, in her wisdom, was coaxing him outside, into the peaceful street. Saving him, when it should have been the other way around.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Peace was written in partial fulfilment of a doctorate at LaTrobe University. The author thanks his supervisor, Professor Sue Martin, and Text Publishing editor Mandy Brett for helping to make it a better book.

  ALSO BY GARRY DISHER FROM TEXT PUBLISHING

  Peninsula Crimes

  The Dragon Man

  Kittyhawk Down

  Snapshot

  Chain of Evidence

  Blood Moon

  Whispering Death

  Signal Loss

  Wyatt

  The Wyatt Butterfly

  (contains Port Vila Blues and The Fallout)

  Wyatt

  The Heat

  Kill Shot

  Under the Cold Bright Lights

  Bitter Wash Road

  Peace

  Garry Disher has published fifty titles across multiple genres. His last standalone novel, Bitter Wash Road, won the 2016 German Crime Prize, a prize he has previously won twice. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.

  garrydisher.com

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000, Australia

  Copyright © Garry Disher, 2019

  The moral right of Garry Disher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2019

  Book design by Text

  Cover image by iStock

  Typeset in Garamond 13.25/18.25 by J&M Typesetting

  ISBN: 9781922268150 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925774924 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia